Most of the trash here is simply burned, after it’s been picked through by dogs and cows (have only seen a few people digging through the trash here; there aren’t any giant piles of trash). Shop owners keep the areas in front of their shops clean, but the same can’t be said of houses; there are some really nice houses behind Vidya Bhawan that have ugly, dirty streets.

There are clear public benefits to responsible disposal of trash; property values rise, the air’s less polluted (and less smelly). Furthermore if I’m disposing trash on your property and you’re picking it up and putting it back on mine we’re both wasting time. But most people in the West pay for garbage disposal, not the other way around.

When did we move to this equilibrium? I’m pretty sure social approval, and maybe littering laws, are the driver behind the no-litter equilibrium; what’s to stop someone from just dumping their trash in the middle of the night? The only successful ad campaign I can think of in this area is the “Don’t Mess with Texas” campaign, which was hugely successful in cutting down on highway littering. The amount of littering I do depends on how much littering I think you’re doing as well as the convenience of disposing of it. It’s possible that rising incomes won’t solve this problem, as it’s a collective action issue. Homeowners associations and malls might be able to solve it, and shop owners can keep their shops clean but I doubt there will be much change otherwise.

Five Types of Question Askers to Avoid
Kevin Burke
Pot, meet kettle:

• The person who just wants the speaker to confirm something that they already believe. You can tell this type because they ask leading yes or no questions. “Do you believe that global warming is going to destroy our way of living?”
• The person who just wants to show off how much they know to everyone else. You can tell this type because they start off their question talking about something they did last year, or by mentioning some news story or obscure point. When there are only two people left in the room who are paying attention to the answer, this question asker has done their job. “I did a research project on abortions in China last year, and I just wanted to know what you think is going to happen when the policy in Sichuan province changes next year,” or “I traveled to your native country last year, and had the chance to meet rural politician X, what do you think him?”
• The question rambler. In the face of silence, many people become nervous and feel the need to continue speaking. They ask a perfectly good question, then try to justify the question and discuss what they think, then discuss what they think the speaker will say, with a few “um”s sprinkled in for good measure, until she’s been speaking for a minute or more and the speaker is confused.
• The activist who launches into a three minute long diatribe, which the speaker won’t touch because it would force her to accept the activist’s false premise. These come in two flavors: the disjointed activist who has spent his fair share of time wearing a sandwich board and standing on the corner of Telegraph and Bancroft, and the kind who are generally in tune with “Barack Obama is a Muslim who is working with the Islamic high command. In three days he’s going to suspend the government and turn everything over to the Saudi’s. How do you plan to respond?”
• The person who asks a factual question that has an easy answer on Wikipedia, or in the syllabus. Usually, this question asker steps forward when everyone’s packing up their things and the teacher asks, “Are there any more questions?”

Fortunately, there are good remedies for these types of dumb questions. The first one is to raise the price of asking a question. Because you’re using everyone’s time by asking one, asking a question generates a negative externality, so charging $1 per question is not unreasonable. If $1 is steep, pool together money with people at your table. Since you’re using their time by asking the question, if they don’t want to contribute money to hear the answer that’s probably a good sign that your question’s not very good. We can also remove the ability of people to signal when they ask questions by having everyone who wants to ask a question write it down and then pass their question two to three seats to the left. Alternatively, we can present all questions to the speaker, and ask the speaker to answer the ones he or she feels like answering. Furthermore, if you’re ever up in front of an audience and someone asks a bad question, be polite, but curt.

This Salon interview is old, but the gist is that a professor realized that as young, innocent children most victims of sexual abuse don’t feel that traumatized while the abuse is happening. In contrast to an event like a rape, where the victim immediately feels terror, pain and shame, and does not consent to the event the feeling most often expressed by child sex abuse victims (at the time of the abuse) is confusion (the upset and anxiety comes when they grow older). So when sexual abuse is described by the media and popular culture as a traumatic event, sexual abuse victims believe that what happened to them doesn’t fit the bill, and don’t tell the relevant authorities. The author also believes that repressed memories are a myth; around the world, people remember traumatic events vividly. Because these events are not really traumatic, people forget about them and then recall them when asked later, which is natural, and has nothing to do with repression. Note that the author is not condoning or excusing sexual abuse; merely observing that for many children, the event is not traumatic or painful (at the time), merely confusing, and because their experience doesn’t match up with the description of sexual abuse in the media they don’t come forward, even though the crime is horrific.

Colin Marshall shares thoughts on interviewing after having done 100 of them. In essence, his advice is to go with the flow of the conversation, don’t prepare questions (but do your research) and ask questions about things about which you are genuinely interested in reading the answer. I keep meaning to start interviewing people; I should start right now but I doubt I will.

Here’s a good review of Center City, the new gigantic development in the center of the Strip in Vegas. I agree that it lacks personality, and two bits in particular reminded me of my own experience there (excepting the suicide bit):

“I start to feel claustrophobic and duck out of the event. For a certain type of person, Vegas is a non-stop party. For me, it induces a kind of persistent low-grade anxiety. There’s something dystopic about the place generally, and CityCenter is starting to feel like the world of Blade Runner come to life. I head back to my room, shut the black-out curtains and lie in bed. More people commit suicide in Las Vegas than in any other city in the United States.”

[…]

“Realistically, this place is as much an artifice as anything on the Strip, a re-imagining of a 19th-century saloon, complete with polished bar, antique typography, Edison bulbs. Why, then, does it feel so much more honest? Because its aesthetic is filtered through a contemporary sensibility? Because it seems a natural part of a vibrant neighborhood? Is this all bullshit I invent to make myself feel more comfortable? Could the real problem with Las Vegas — my real problem with Las Vegas — be that its commercial imperatives are simply too transparent?”

Here’s an illustrated post describing 10 reasons to avoid talking on the phone. I don’t enjoy talking on the phone; on days like my birthday when lots of people call I get stressed out. It must show because people say I sound very funny when I talk on the phone.

Many Republican governors made a big show out of repealing the stimulus but as Jonathan Chait points out, Republican states generally get more federal money in than they give to the federal government in tax revenue than Democratic states. He also profiles Mitch Daniels, whose Indiana country bumpkin-ism is phony, as a former pharmaceutical company CEO, but who has generally governed Indiana from the middle, expanding health care and increasing taxes. My preferred Republican candidate is still Jon Huntsman, but he won’t be back on the national stage until around 2014, probably.

“I really did travel with a tour company that decided to allow us to paint the school that was on their bike route. We painted it poorly, I must say, as we rushed to complete it in one day (and most of us felt too tired to put in a big effort). We probably spent $200 on paint (25% of which we dropped on the floor). The project was in rural Thailand, and $200 could have probably bought a lot of educational resources, hired a few teachers for a month, or done a list of other things which would have added more educational value than our patchy blue paint job. If they insisted on painting, if they had instead funded $3000 towards a locally identified educational need (for example, a weekly life-skills training course), plus bought $200 worth of paint, at least then our combined efforts would have been more than just the blue paint on the floor.”

Voluntourism creates an unhealthy culture:

“As Saundra has told us over and over again and as I have learned through seeing the negative effects of an unbridled tourism culture of giving things away “to the poor people”, giving things to people is never going to solve their problems. Instead, it can destroy local markets, create community jealousies, and create a culture of dependency.”

Tour companies don’t monitor projects effectively:

“A tour company in India allowed tourists to hand out goats to families on their tours. In the middle of the tour, a person from a nearby village came and told the director that the man who had been put in charge of choosing which poor families should get the goats had been charging the families for the goats for years. The tour company had been making their English speaking tour guide rich, were not helping “the poorest of the poor” that they claimed to be, and had furthered corruption and mistrust in the village.”

“There are many orphanages in Cambodia which take volunteers to teach English. Some come for a few weeks, others for a few days. When they leave, the classes have no teacher, there is no curriculum to ensure that the students aren’t learning “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes” every day, and the school is not better able to solve its own problems in the future because of the volunteer’s visit. If skilled teachers had spent time teaching English teachers English, they would have improved the system at least slightly, but sadly, everyone just wants to pet the cute kids.”

Last but not least, the tours “foster moral imperialism” among volunteers:

This one is the biggest problem I think, but the least talked about. We assume, because we come from wealthier places with better education systems, that we can come into any new place without knowing much about the culture or the people, and we can fix things. We can’t! THEY, the people who live there and know the place well, can. Our job in the development world can and should be to support them in doing so. So, we can’t assume we can come do it for them and “save the babies” by visiting an orphanage for a few hours on our trip to India. And we sure shouldn’t think that our time is oh so valuable that we should fundraise money to pay for OUR flights to go paint a school poorly. My job, in running a tour operation, is to educate travelers on at least these two points: improvements take time, and the people we are visiting have just as much—if not more—to teach us as we have to teach them.

The bottom line is that “voluntourists” are more interested in showing that they care than in actually helping make a difference. This is one reason why I could never be a college admissions officer; I would reject outright any student that wrote about this sort of work in glowing terms (and I know many do).

I was pretty careful in vetting organizations at the beginning of the trip, and I know that the organization I’m working for does things the right way. I don’t have any illusions about the value of the work I’m doing. I tend to think of the main point of my trip as spending time traveling, learning about a different culture and trying to learn several specific skills.

It became clear very quickly that I don’t know much about the culture, and I definitely don’t know enough Hindi to get by. I do have some useful skills; I’ve been spending more than my fair share of time doing things for the NGO that I am good at, in particular redesigning their website to attract more money in donations (the revenue from which, when complete, will far exceed the cost of the plane flight), and writing grant proposals in English.

Traveling to a foreign country is an excellent experience and I recommend it, if you or your parents have the means. The longer you can stay the better, but even if you can only go for one week, don’t pay for one of these trips though. Aim for one of the smaller cities, then a month before you leave, buy a phrasebook and practice. Once you get there, rent a bike/car and get out into the countryside, eat the local food and try your best to make conversation.

• GDP and good management practices are highly correlated (R^2 of 0.81). That is, countries with high GDP are also likely to have firms with good management practices. Greece scores even worse than India and Brazil on firm management. Portugal is just slightly ahead of India and Brazil. Their low scores can be attributed in part to government intervention in the labor market.
• Improved reallocation accounts for a large percentage of the difference. That is, the market identifies more efficient firms and allows them to grow more rapidly in countries like the USA. Competition is highly important for this process, and also to weed out inefficient firms. It’s more important to look at the bottom of the distribution than the top to determine which countries have the best management; countries that allow inefficient firms to hang around score poorly.
• Higher management scores are correlated with better performance at the firm level. A one standard-deviation increase in management correlates with a 38 percent increase in sales per employee.
• Larger firms have better management. On the surface this may refute the Peter Principle, but it tends to suggest that smaller firms with better management out-grow other small firms with bad management. Over time, if a firm stays the same size perhaps management falls.
• At the firm level, better management is associated with improved health care outcomes, employee satisfaction, and energy efficiency. Note to shareholder activists: Promote better management!
• Labor market regulation hinders incentives management. At least half of incentives management is the ability to remove/improve low-performing workers, pay for performance and change the workstaff’s hours.
• In terms of classes of ownership, private equity companies have the best management, followed by dispersed shareholder ownership. Government has the worst management, followed closely by family firms with a in-family CEO, firms still owned by the founders, and firms owned by private individuals. I was surprised to see that firms owned by the founder (in 100-5000 person companies) perform so poorly. The authors suggest that necessary management skills for a start-up don’t transfer well to necessary skills for a 100-5000 person firm.
• Management practices diffuse slowly over time. Managers are not well informed about how good their own management practices are and which areas need improvement (ha! Maybe there’s a role for consultants after all.

All in all these suggest that one of the best things we can do for development is try to transfer good management practices to developing nations, either in the form of FDI or through education. There was a great speaker at the Ath last year whose firm provided business guidance to small companies in Mexico and helped them grow.

Another experiment by the same group took a random group of textile firms in India and provided them with free management consulting. Not only did performance grow in the firms provided the consulting, but they also said the reason that they didn’t implement the changes sooner was because they were not aware of good management practices.

Data collection is an underrated skill – this analysis was only possible because these guys arranged surveys of thousands of firms in 40 different countries. The impressiveness is in the dataset, not in the analysis; same goes for Ken Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart’s This Time is Different, which I’m currently reading. It’s usually lumped in with science or statistics but it’s something people should know how to do (and analyze)

Ostensibly, Congress ended Madagascar’s inclusion in the program because of a military coup in March. But there isn’t really much evidence that imposing sanctions on the workers has had or will have any effect on the authoritarian leadership. Indeed these sanctions tend to hit the working classes much more than they hit the people in charge. Growth and good governance go hand in hand, but it doesn’t make sense to kill a country’s growth because the government changed.

Robert Strauss, head of the American Chamber of Commerce in Madagascar, told IRIN that a quarter of the jobs in the formal economy were dependent on AGOA, and the reintroduction of US import duties of up to 34 percent had made keeping factories open unprofitable.

The rapid decline of the textile industry was also having a knock-on effect in other countries in the region, including Mauritius, Swaziland, Lesotho and South Africa, where many of the materials used in Madagascar’s textile factories, such as zips, were produced, Strauss said.
[...]
Fabien Rakotonirina, a textile factory machinist who lost his job in December 2010, told IRIN: “Here on the street there is not enough profit. In the factory I earned 10,000 ariary ($4.65) a day, now I earn 6,000 ($2.80).”

The second story is from India, whose farmers this year will produce less rice per hectare than Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. The Indian government has long subsidized the use of different types of fertilizer in agricultural production, which has by and large stimulated crop yields and reduced India’s need to import food. As government revenues wax and wane, subsidies have gone up and down – but the urea (a type of fertilizer) manufacturers are politically powerful and have prevented the urea subsidy from being touched. Because urea is so much cheaper than other fertilizers and nutrients, farmers are spreading way more urea on their crops than is recommended (32-to-1 ratios of nitrogen to potassium, which should be about 4-to-1) and the soil quality is deteriorating. As a result India may soon have to increase its dependence on importing food.

India has been providing farmers with heavily subsidized fertilizer for more than three decades. The overuse of one type—urea—is so degrading the soil that yields on some crops are falling and import levels are rising. So are food prices, which jumped 19% last year…Farmers spread the rice-size urea granules by hand or from tractors. They pay so little for it that in some areas they use many times the amount recommended by scientists, throwing off the chemistry of the soil, according to multiple studies by Indian agricultural experts…The government has subsidized other fertilizers besides urea. In budget crunches, subsidies on those fertilizers have been reduced or cut, but urea’s subsidy has survived. That’s because urea manufacturers form a powerful lobby, and farmers are most heavily reliant on this fertilizer, making it a political hot potato to raise the price.

These are both examples that demonstrate the fragility of good incentives and growth, and the power of special interests and far away people to destroy it. Throwing money or sanctions at these problems is not very helpful, but encouraging trade and denying special interests are. Politics always has winners and losers; the winners here are textile manufacturers in America and other countries, and urea manufacturers, and the losers are producers in Madagascar, taxpayers in the US (who bear the cost of the subsidy as well as the market price of the food) and farmers in India.

I wanted to share some good quotes from the book. Abbe Faria, a priest locked up in prison for 15 years, is asked by Dantes, “What would you not have accomplished if you were free?” and replies,

“Possibly nothing at al; the overflow of my brain would probably, in a state of freedom, have evaporated into a thousand follies; misfortune is needed to bring to light the treasures of the human intellect. Compression is needed to explode gunpowder. Captivity has brought my mental faculties to a focus; and you are well aware that from the collision of clouds electricity is produced-from electricity, lightning, from lightning, illumination.”

Here’s another one, about the career-driven M. de Villefort and society:

Ordinarily M. de Villefort made and returned very few visits. His wife visited for him, and this was the received thing in the world, where the weighty and multifarious occupations of the magistrate were accepted as an excuse for what was really only calculated pride, a manifestation of professed superiority – in fact, the application of the axiom, “Pretend to think well of yourself, and the world will think well of you,” an axiom a hundred times more useful in society nowadays than that of the Greeks, “Know thyself,” a knowledge for which, in our days, we have substituted the less difficult and more advantageous science of knowing others

• Kumbulgarh is a giant fort, in the middle of nowhere, on top of a plateau, with huge walls and a series of gates and walls leading up to a castle on a hill on the plateau. Given the fortifications and technology at the time I guessed it would have taken around twenty invaders for every defender to storm the thing. Which begs the question, why would any invading army bother capturing the fort? Just surround the whole plateau and steal all the food and messengers coming in, and you’ve effectively captured all of the land. For a fort to be effective, everyone must have had their huts/houses inside, but there wasn’t that much room on the top of the plateau, to support an army or otherwise. Sure, giant fortifications can keep people out but they can also make it really tough to maneuver.
• There’s a passage in one of the Michael Crichton books that talks about the eerie silence in the Middle Ages, when there are no buzzing airplanes, cars or electronics emitting ambient noise. Crichton’s wrong on this point, because there are always animals around, and stuff like the wind that rustles trees, but it gets noticeably quiet when you are out in rural areas.
• There were clearly different levels to the fort, with the palace at the top, so back in the day, you could tell someone’s status really easily by what level of the hill they lived on. People probably went their whole lives without getting to the top of the fort. Now you can get to the top of the fort for 5 rupees.



• Tourist traps and historical sites can only make so much money charging admission, licensing guides and selling merchandise. I think tourist sites can go further nowadays in selling an experience to visitors, and especially selling exclusivity, to people that demand those sorts of things. Only a Westerner would say this, but I couldn’t help looking around and thinking about how cool it would be to have a giant paintball tournament or other battle-type event at the fort. Take the Tough Mudder competition for example – a 24 hour competition designed to test endurance and strength, and push people to their limits. Tough Mudder sells a story about toughness to people; complete this and you will have higher confidence and something to boast to your friends about. Why hasn’t someone thought to do the same at some of our coolest historic sites (at least the less reputable ones)? No question you could earn more revenue with a 1000-person, 5-day-and-night paintball tournament (biodegradable, washable paint, of course). All it would take is a blatant disregard for the reverence due to history. Historic sites only sell an experience so much; they could do a lot more if they were willing to be a little more entrepreneurial (and less respectful). Maybe I underestimate the tourism options available for the ultra-rich.
• We hired a cab driver for the day (good decision) but he stopped at a restaurant that was, on reflection, a complete tourist trap. Not only was the food overpriced, but as a restaurant that caters to tourists, the food was geared to the lowest common denominator, e.g. a tourist who hates spicy food. Why people who can’t eat spicy food come to India is a mystery, but the lesson remains; any place that caters to (foreign) tourists is going to have bad food (and a big menu). While we ate the cab driver disappeared in the back, to eat lunch, no doubt. He probably ate way better than we did for about a twentieth of the price. Note to self: In the future, pack lunch.

Ranakpur

• Ranakpur was a series of three awesome Jain temples, in the middle of the jungle. The temples were very beautiful, peaceful, and cool, decorated in marble on the inside and out. The temples were supported by many pillars (again, awesome for paintball); any one of the pillars by itself could have been an extremely valuable work of art, together they were overwhelming, and almost made you underestimate the amount of work that must have gone into any particular one.
• It’s interesting to see how the ideal human form changes from religion to religion and culture to culture. In Buddhism the ideal is a smiling, fat Buddha; in Catholicism, a lean, suffering Jesus Christ; in Islam there are no pictures of faces. The Jain idols had very wide faces. Maybe this is just a relic of the sculpting style back in the day.
• The temple is very much still active and there were many ascetics sitting crosslegged, praying and walking around the temple. There were many visitors just watching the Jains. I think it would be difficult to pray, or reach any sort of positive mental state, with so many people watching.
• Every religion allows people to tell the difference between believers and non-believers. Believers seek out clothing, rituals, audible prayers and other visible actions that distinguish themselves from non-believers. In this case the Jains were wearing white almost-togas. It would be pretty awful to believe in something and not let others know that you believed it.

Photos when I get a more reliable internet connection…